Upper Mad River Trail, Mad Lake — Tuesday, Jul. 1, 2003

Central Cascades > Entiat Mountains/Lake Chelan

We backpacked up the Upper Mad River trail, camped two nights at Blue Creek Camp, in between hiking the loop north of camp including the spur trails to Mad Lake and Klone Peak. The Mad River valley is not spectacular, in dryish pine forest with few flowers in the meadows and nothing craggy in sight from the valley, but we had the place to ourselves and the solitude and the view from Klone Peak made the trip worthwhile. Quite a few mosquitos at camp, but not too many otherwise except around the lakes (Mad and the Two Little Lakes on the map, signed Lake Ann and Lake Louise in the flesh). There was very little snow on the trails we hiked, most of the brief trail sections under snow being near Two Little Lakes. This is definitely a trail to do before July 15, but note that only some of the region's trails are closed to motor traffic out of season. In fact, on July 3 we heard but never saw a couple of motorbikes from atop Klone Peak. Likely they (legally) came up the Tommie Ridge trail then proceeded (illegally) to ride around the loop to Blue Creek Campground from there, as we saw their fresh tracks on trail and snow as we completed the loop. The junction with the Jimmy Creek trail is easily missed on the way up as it is not signed and leaves the Upper Mad River trail at a very acute angle back to the southeast. We encountered the only people we met during the hike as we were hiking out upstream of the junction; they were looking for it and I told them that I hadn't seen it hiking down but hadn't seen it on the way up, either. Downstream from meeting them, I saw the trail, which is within five minutes of the bridge over the Mad River. On the hike in, we chose not to ford the river but to instead find the way trail reputed to continue on the same side, rejoining the trail at the next ford. It's not difficult bushwhacking, but there is no consistent trail we could find, and crossing Whistling Pig creek is a bit of a pain. The upper Mad River crossing was easily done on stones and logs, the lower crossing two of us forded (we had brought our watershoes and were determined to use them once) and our companion crossed on a somewhat tricky log crossing just upstream.